March 15, 2007 • Volume 15 Number 13

Five BC Faculty Net NSF Honors

By Greg Frost
Staff Writer

Five junior Boston College faculty are receiving prestigious
early-career awards from the National Science Foundation
this year, a milestone that puts Boston College among
the ranks of top-rated national research institutes.

Vice Provost for Research Kevin Bedell noted that until
this year, BC faculty had received a total of five
CAREER awards over the previous 12 years - and never
more than two in a given year. Previous winners include
Prof. Marc Snapper (Chemistry) and Assoc. Prof. Gail
Kineke (Geology and Geophysics).

"This is a sign of great faculty appointments that
foretells of even greater things to come. It's a significant
achievement both for the individual professors and
for BC, as it puts us in the company of major national
research institutions like Stanford, MIT and Princeton,"
Bedell said.

"It's truly a reflection of the quality of our
faculty and the increased emphasis we as an institution
are placing on research and education."

Together, the five professors are garnering $2.5 million
in NSF CAREER funding, to be distributed over the next
five years.

*Asst. Prof. Steve Bruner (Chemistry) will receive $575,000
for his study of the intricate way in which plants
and microorganisms produce molecules used in therapeutic
drugs. Bruner's research program uses an interdisciplinary
approach, including structural biology and synthetic
organic chemistry, to study the protein machines responsible
for the biosynthesis of natural products. A detailed
understanding of these systems at the molecular level
will enable the rational engineering of these systems
and will facilitate the development of more effective
and/or novel medicines.

*Asst. Prof. Vidya Madhavan (Physics) will receive $500,000
for her study of "spin," a property that
electrons exhibit in addition to their charge. Spin
is the microscopic, quantum mechanical analog of a
classical, macroscopic magnet. It's a property scientists
hope will lead to a new generation of semiconductor-based
electronic devices - spintronics - that use both the
charge and spin of the electron. Spintronic devices
are expected to carry information on both the charge
and spin channels, making them faster and requiring
less current.

*Asst. Prof. David Martin (Computer Science) will receive
$500,000 over five years for his work on bringing "visual
intelligence" to computers by building software
that can view an image and react intelligently to its
content. For that to happen, machines need to understand
what they are looking at - and that is no easy task
given the conscious and unconscious processes that
let human beings quickly and easily process visual
information. Specifically, Martin is working on finding
a universal "mid-level" representation of
visual information that is between the low-level dots
(or pixels) of an image and the high-level conscious
experience that most human beings have.

*Asst. Prof. Noah Snyder (Geology and Geophysics) will
receive around $430,000 - the exact amount will be
finalized this spring - to investigate the history
and physical processes of several rivers in northern
Maine that are host to the last remaining populations
of wild Atlantic salmon in the United States. Snyder
hopes to understand how ongoing and future changes
(such as reforestation, stream restoration, fish reintroduction,
and dam removal) will affect channel shape and habitat.
Student research teams will conduct research in the
field, and Martin plans to share results and recommendations
with government land-management officials and watershed
restoration non-profitgroups.

*Clare Booth Luce Assistant Professor in Computer Science
Stella Yu will receive $500,000 for her interdisciplinary
work in art and vision. In studying how computers might
be instructed to interpret three-dimensional images,
Yu will examine the ways artists have organized pigments
on two-dimensional canvas to evoke the sense of a three-dimensional
scene for viewers. She hopes that studying these artistic
techniques will lend insights into the computation
of recovering scene layout from pixels.